Estimating the proportion of a horse's evolved opportunities — in movement, foraging, social contact, environmental access, and agency — that remain available under its current management system.
The horse's biological programme — the evolved system of drives, capacities, and information-processing mechanisms that regulates its behaviour — was shaped across 55 million years as a cursorial, social, grazing prey animal on open terrain. Under domestication, many of the environmental inputs and behavioural outputs that programme expects are no longer available.
The TFI is not a welfare instrument. It does not ask whether the horse is happy, stressed, or suffering. It asks a more precise question: of the evolved opportunities this animal's biology is structured to access — movement across space, continuous foraging, social bonds, environmental information, and self-directed behaviour — what proportion is currently available?
A score of 100 indicates full access to evolved opportunity across all domains. A score of 0 indicates complete restriction. The instrument is educational: it maps the gap between what the horse's biology expects and what its management currently provides.
The TFI is structured around five domains, each derived from the horse's evolutionary history and each separately restrictable under management. A horse can have movement without foraging freedom, social access without environmental openness, or opportunity in all four domains without meaningful agency.
Each domain contains four questions. All questions are factual — they ask what is available, not whether it is provided adequately. Responses are scored 0–3 per question. Domain scores are expressed as percentages of maximum opportunity, and the five domain scores are averaged to produce the composite TFI. Completion takes approximately 3–5 minutes.
Feral horses cover 10–80 km per day across varied terrain, with full control over the timing, direction, and pace of movement. Movement is not supplementary to the horse's life — it is the primary medium through which foraging, social contact, environmental monitoring, and predator avoidance occur.
1.On a typical day, how many hours can your horse move freely without a person directing its movement?
2.Approximately how large is the area your horse can access and move in freely on a typical day?
3.Does the area your horse moves in include varied ground types or terrain?
4.Can your horse move at any pace it chooses — including canter and gallop — in its available space?
Wild horses spend 16–20 hours per day grazing, covering ground while eating, and selecting from diverse plant species. The equine digestive system is built for near-continuous fibre intake — not meals. The foraging programme and the locomotion programme are intertwined: the horse moves in order to graze, and grazes in order to move.
5.How many hours per day does your horse have access to forage — grass, hay, or haylage?
6.How is forage typically provided?
7.Does your horse have regular access to living grass — pasture grazing or strip-grazing?
8.How many different types of forage does your horse have access to?
Horses evolved as obligate social animals in stable, mixed-sex bands of 3–20 or more individuals, with continuous proximity, direct physical contact, mutual grooming, collective movement, and long-term bonds. Social isolation in the wild represents acute danger. The social programme is not optional — it is structural.
9.Can your horse make direct physical contact with another horse — touching, mutual grooming, or play?
10.Does your horse have at least one consistent companion it can always access?
11.How many hours per day is your horse within sight and sound of another horse?
12.Can your horse choose which horses to spend time near, within its available companions?
As a prey animal on open terrain, the horse evolved to continuously read its environment through panoramic vision, independently rotating ears, olfaction, and hoof-ground proprioception. Environmental information is not incidental to its biology — it is the primary data stream the programme is built to process. Architectural confinement removes much of it at once.
13.How many hours per day is your horse outdoors, exposed to natural conditions — weather, wind, and changing light?
14.What best describes the ground surface your horse stands on for most of the day?
15.How often does your horse encounter something genuinely new — a novel environment, terrain, smell, or object?
16.How open is your horse's visual environment for most of the day?
Feral horses make thousands of self-directed decisions each day: where to move, when to rest, who to approach, what to eat, how to respond. Agency — the capacity to initiate and regulate one's own behaviour — is not a luxury of wild life. It is a core feature of the equine biological programme, present in individual horses and distributed across the herd as collective decision-making.
17.When you approach your horse in its own space, can it move away from you?
18.Can your horse choose when to rest — to lie down or stand quietly — without being disturbed?
19.On a typical day, who initiates most of your horse's significant activities — eating, moving, social interaction?
20.Can your horse move away from physical discomfort — for example, to seek shelter from sun or rain, shade, or distance from flies?
Please answer all 20 questions before calculating.
All 20 questions must be answered. No data is stored or transmitted.
TFI Result
Domain Scores
These scores estimate the proportion of evolved opportunity available in each domain — not a welfare assessment. A score of 100 means the full range of evolved capacity in that domain is accessible under current management; 0 means complete restriction. Domain scores can be read independently: a high composite with one very low domain score is more informative than the composite alone.